May heaven be hospitable to you, George Whitman

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“Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise”

I should not be typing up a blog post. Thanks to those of you who have been concerned about my hands, arm and shoulder, which are giving me grief from inflammation due to work on the computer. I am trying to be good and limit typing to university work. But I cannot neglect posting on the peaceful-in-his-sleep passing of American George Whitman, owner of the Shakespeare & Co bookstore in the Latin Quarter of Paris since 1951, at age 98. The quote above is painted above the lintel of a doorway in the happily disheveled shop, where books are roughly categorized by type, and you worry that you will topple a pile of them when you squeeze around a corner into the next room.

The first time I "met" Mr. Whitman was in 1997, one of the thousands (millions?) of strangers who have visited him there, caught in the above photo, taken by my sister Nancy. She and I spent two weeks in Paris after our mother died with Alzheimer's. Nancy had been Mom's primary caregiver for six months, and this was Nancy's much deserved vacation; she invited me along. Mr. Whitman stamped my Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin with this emblem of the shop (right). Read my first blog post at my Paris blog (Paris Deconstructed) in April 2006, about the time Mr. Whitman asked if I had a place to sleep, here.

I would love to type up more for you to read about George Whitman, but I must keep this short. You can read his story in this NYTimes article upon his death yesterday. He was a legend, and in case you're wondering, the NYTimes article seems to lay to rest the question about whether George was related to Walt Whitman. I will always think fondly of him, for the way he opened his arms to me one day in 2004 and asked if I had a place to sleep. Has anyone ever been sorry they had a place to sleep? I was that day, and I regretted saying, "yes."

My then sister-in-law Donica snapped this photo in 2004
 of George Whitman while he was asking me 
if I had a pillow for the night (fuller story here);

he invited writers and bibliophiles to sleep in his upstairs guest room, 
as long as they agreed to sweep up and help around the shop;
but my sister Boots (Ginnie)
and her then wife Donica and I already had a place

 

an upstairs room before a poetry reading (not by me!) on my solo trip in 2006; 
authors and poets like Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett,
 James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg read in his bookshop  

I love this board in front of the bookshop, with his brief but wonderful
autobio that ends with ". . . it is my daughter's turn" which refers to

Sylvia Beach Whitman, who now runs the store and was 

named for Sylvia Beach, the woman 
who owned the first Shakespeare & Co bookstore; 
history of Shakespeare & Co at wiki here

me in front of the bookstore in 2004;

George Whitman was already old then,

and I wondered if he'd live to be 100

Oh, and in case you have never seen it, you can witness
the extraordinary way Mr. Whitman "cut" his hair in this video;
there is a bonus if you watch and listen.

Below is the view of the Notre Dame cathedral just across the Seine

from Shakespeare & Co, when Don and I

stepped out of the bookstore in 2003, and a storm was brewing.

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